The 18-year-old who once called a backyard shed his home was exhausted after a turbulent summer.

Just weeks before, Daniel had left the ramshackle structure and moved into a garage apartment behind a Winter Park mansion. He took a second job and began classes at a technical school.

Yet he couldn't escape the family turmoil that left him homeless in the first place.

As the August air inside the summer-school classroom closed in around him, Daniel shut his eyes and, for a moment, blacked out the world.

It was late June when Daniel finally dared to look out his new apartment window. He could see green treetops, red-tiled roofs and blue swimming pools.

His landlord, the Winter Park lawyer who had offered the homeless teenager a rent-free apartment and the chance of a better life, lived in the big house on the other side of the pool.

Daniel had a new job, too, with real responsibility. His shoulders straightened every morning when his boss at Nodarse & Associates in Winter Park handed Daniel a clipboard with a list of the day's tasks.

Soon, Daniel would be able to test the strength of concrete, a skill lab techs at the environmental firm were happy to teach him.

The women in the office fawn over Daniel. They bake him cookies, buy him groceries and help him draft a budget. But when Daniel tried to save laundry quarters by wearing a lime-green shirt one day too many, a manager bought him khakis and oxfords and showed the 6-foot-4-inch teen what to wear to work.

His boss, Darlene Bradley, scheduled Daniel's hours around classes at Winter Park Tech, where he studies computer-support systems. He divided his week between Nodarse, school and weekends working at Burger King.

Jennifer Eubanks and Cheryl Romaine, the teachers who steered Daniel through graduation from Edgewater High School in May, shuttled him to appointments, filled out college paperwork and bought him vitamins. Each new problem he faced led to a flurry of phone calls from Eubanks to Romaine to Bradley and others who provided the calling tree that became his lifeline.

The teachers had become surrogate mothers to the young man whose own mother, never a stable part of his life, had finally walked out when he was about 14.

"I worry about him every day," Romaine said.

Now the teachers can't imagine life without Daniel. He is their surrogate son.

Daniel calls them his "momish friends" but yearns for his mother, Marcia. She calls sometimes from Sanford, usually drunk. Often homeless.

"I still miss my real mom," Daniel said, drawing on childhood memories of his mother in their Home Acres house, baking him macaroni and cheese and brewing sweet tea.

Like another world

Life was good for Daniel, but problems were just days away.

His brother, Joseph Lazzatti, never meant to cause Daniel trouble.

During the summer, Joseph and his wife, Mercedes Borges, had moved back to the neighborhood from Leesburg so they could be closer to Daniel. The 21-year-olds were caught up in their own tailspin of despair after an accident in an uninsured car left them with no ride, no jobs and more bills.

When Daniel moved out of the shed, Joseph and Mercedes moved in.

Despite his own troubles, Joseph felt obliged to look out for his younger brother.

"I was worried about whether or not he'd make the right decisions," he said.

So one night, after Daniel's Burger King shift, Joseph, his wife and a friend walked Daniel home.

It was 3:30 a.m., and the streetlights burned softly through the Spanish moss that hangs from the oak trees, illuminating a brick-paved cul-de-sac. It was only two miles from where they grew up, but it was another world.

The trio marveled at Daniel's new place: a former bachelor's pad equipped with games and a karaoke machine.

Inside, they played air hockey for a few hours before crashing on the floor for the night.

Trouble was, Joseph, Mercedes and their friend weren't supposed to be there.

Daniel had promised Eubanks and Romaine that neither family nor friends from his old life would visit his new home.

The teachers wanted to insulate Daniel from a culture that had robbed him of bikes, pocket change, an Xbox, his childhood.

But the next afternoon the landlord's daughter spotted the visitors leaving in a taxi and told her father.

The landlord, who does not want to be identified, was willing to let Daniel continue living in his garage apartment. But he was concerned about the type of people Daniel was hanging out with. So he reached out to the calling tree for advice.

At first, Eubanks cried. Romaine nearly vomited. Finally, the women came to a bitter conclusion: Daniel had to leave if he was to be protected from the endless demands of his family.

"We're not trying to be mean," Eubanks said. "We're just trying to make him successful in life."

He had lived in the Winter Park apartment for seven days.

Daniel doesn't like to talk about that night.

It was a test, he said. Teenagers are supposed to test their limits.

How could a visit be so wrong when a broken bond between brothers isn't?

He shrugged: "Blood is thicker than water."

A sheet for a mattress

For four weeks stretching into July, Daniel was homeless again.

He told his teachers that he would sleep on a recliner at a friend's Apopka home while they hunted for another apartment.

Instead, he turned to the woman who had helped him two years earlier when his father could not afford to pay the rent on his own home. Sondra Allen had cleared her shed to provide Daniel with a refuge.

Joseph had the shed now, so Daniel slept in the only space Allen had to offer: the concrete carport with a dirty sheet as a mattress.

The day Daniel returned, his father stopped by.

"What are you doing here, Danny?" he asked.

Daniel told him he had been evicted.

Al Lazzatti shook his head.

Daniel felt paralyzed, fearing he had disappointed his father.

Later his boss, Darlene Bradley, noticed the changes in Daniel. He had stopped bathing, talking, smiling.

Daniel, who in grade school was diagnosed with a mild form of autism, needs routine and order to help him cope. As his world crumbled, so did Daniel.

Bradley phoned the teachers.

Dad demands a house

Al Lazzatti's voice fills with resentment at mention of the two teachers who are helping his son. He thinks money raised for Daniel after the Orlando Sentinel first told his story in May should be used to buy the family a house so they can all live together.

"Those women kicked out my Danny," he said. "They need to get us a house."

The father is a grizzled man who wears his hair in a low ponytail under knit caps and braids his beard in two sections. He is homeless and admits he smokes crack cocaine.

But Lazzatti insists he was there for Daniel from the day he was born. He gave him his name and raised the child as his own, even though he isn't the biological father. When Lazzatti, Daniel and Joseph were evicted from their home in 2004, the father said he made sure to pitch his tent in the woods within whistling distance of Daniel.

He brought his boys what he could. Bummed cigarettes for Joseph. And for Daniel, bear-claw pastries and bananas that the 7-Eleven was about to discard.

"I was there until the end, studying with him," Lazzatti said, referring to Daniel's high-school graduation.

Daniel was a golden boy to the residents of Home Acres, a neighborhood of condemned houses and stinking septic tanks that decades earlier was touted as a dream development.

Lazzatti made that clear late one hot night in 2006 as he escorted his son to the shed after a study session at a nearby house where the father sometimes crashed.

"You know you're going to be the savior for everyone here," Lazzatti said, turning to his son. "You're the Lazzattis' Jesus."

Daniel remembered that his father walked so slowly it felt as if he were pulling Earth to a stop.

"Those are pretty big words to say," Daniel said later, awe in his voice.

Daniel still enjoys an occasional Sunday-evening chat with Lazzatti, whom he refers to as the old man.

Old man, not Dad.

That's because Daniel's mother taught him an important survival lesson before she left: Think of your parents as friends. It hurts less that way.

Because while Daniel is sure that Lazzatti likes him, that's where his certainty ends.

"If he loves me," Daniel said, "I'm not too sure about that."

Pals ask for help

While Daniel was battling despair, Eubanks and Romaine, unaware that he had returned to his old haunts, were struggling to find him a place to live.

At the end of July, after scores of phone calls and visits to rental units, the teachers found an efficiency for $454 a month located less than four blocks from Daniel's old shed.

If anyone else stays, they admonished the teen, you'll be kicked out. You'll be homeless again.

Daniel agreed that he would abide by their rules.

But he didn't know how to escape his family or Sondra Allen and her sons, who were constantly seeking help.

His story had brought him celebrity, donations and a new job. As his fortunes improved, people around him started demanding a share.

Dan, can you lend us a couple of bucks? We got nothing to eat here.

Dan, how about we go to the ATM?

Because Sondra Allen always opened her house to stragglers she could not afford to feed, Daniel let her borrow from his pantry. The sacrifice left him eating out and eating less.

Daniel also fronted Joseph $50 to pay a cell-phone bill. Daniel had lost touch with his brother when he moved to the shed, even forgetting the sound of his voice. That must never happen again.

He bought an Xbox to cheer up a friend with a broken home. He ordered Domino's pizzas for some new friends, whom he allowed to pull all-nighters at his efficiency to practice for a video-game competition.

His checking account dipped to $1.67.

Once again, Romaine and Eubanks stepped in.

They set up a budget and paid a year's rent on the apartment by dipping into donations.

Daniel fought the teachers over using the fund.

That's for emergencies, he said. "This is not an emergency."

Bruised but not afraid

By the August afternoon when Daniel passed out in class, he had worked or attended school every day for three weeks.

He flunked that test but later earned a certificate to work on a computer help desk. He quit his second job at Burger King three days later and spent his first free weekend in two years playing video games in his apartment.

Daniel's new place is neither the shed beyond the Allens' empty pool nor the swanky garage apartment above a glittering one. It's somewhere in between.

He has enough room for a TV, a futon, a computer desk and a dresser.

Daniel sees his father in 20-minute capsules, sometimes crossing paths at the Sunoco or in front of Nodarse.

Yet his life is still dogged by fear and violence.

Last weekend, Daniel forgot to lock the gates at Nodarse when it closed for the day. It was 2 a.m. Sunday when he realized what he had done, so he grabbed his keys and ran the eight blocks to work.

As he crossed the parking lot, three men jumped him. One hit Daniel hard over the eyebrow with a cell phone or possibly a gun. Daniel isn't sure. The attackers punched and kicked him to the ground. They fled with his empty wallet, house keys, flash drive, MP3 player and cell phone.

He called the police, then walked home armed with a 2-by-4 for protection.

His father stopped by later and told Daniel that he had found his credit, debit and laundry cards in the grass near where the assault took place.

Daniel was bruised but not afraid.

"That's just life in the neighborhood," he said.

Daniel grew up expecting to be hurt.

He said he never deserved the life the Winter Park lawyer offered him. How could he have ever paid back such benevolence?

But now he is learning to take responsibility. Too much has slipped away in his life, he said.

This time, he's in charge.

"I wouldn't trade this for anything," Daniel said. "Not even for a million dollars."